Ingrained in the nation's educational system, intelligence tests
are as American as apple pie. They play a crucial role in everything from
college admissions to military job assignments. But IQ and aptitude tests have
come under increasing criticism in recent years as measures of real-world
intelligence. Although educators still generally consider them good predictors
of school performance, a faction of the psychological community is challenging
the use of traditional standardized tests. Led by Harvard's Howard Gardner, the
upstarts embrace the theory of multiple intelligences, which holds that there
are many varieties of intelligence encompassing talents often ignored by
traditional IQ tests. As these new theorists exert a growing influence on
educators' understanding of intelligence, the nation's classrooms could witness
a quiet revolution in teaching and testing.

The Jacksonville, Fla., fifth-graders were working intently
ontheir projects -- designing cities of the future. Bursting with creative
excitement, one boy ran over to a group of educators who were observing the
class and described his creation, which featured an elaborate transportation
system for the elderly. One of the visitors was so impressed with the boy's
detailed explanation that he wondered why he wasn't in the school's gifted and
talented (GT) program. But when he checked the boy's test records, he discovered
that his IQ score didn't meet the program's minimum.

In Hollywood's version of the story, the boy would have been
admitted to the program, and like the Karate Kid, he would have overcome all
obstacles and excelled. But this is real life. Although the boy seemed a
promising GT candidate, his test scores said otherwise. End of story.

IQ tests, ingrained in the nation's education system, are as
American as apple pie. But their ability to distinguish intellectual talent has
been questioned since their creation at the turn of the century. Now,
iconoclastic researchers are again challenging standardized intelligence tests,
once more raising emotional questions about how American society balances merit,
talent and equal opportunity in an ethnically and socially diverse nation.

The current wave of concern about intelligence tests -- which
include IQ, aptitude and ability tests -- goes back to 1969, when psychologist
Arthur R. Jensen set off a firestorm of controversy by suggesting that IQ
differences between blacks and whites were due to genetic factors. Jensen's
troubling assertion spawned press reports that tended to portray IQ testing as a
distasteful and inaccurate measure of individual ability. [1]

But even as the public's faith in IQ tests was diminishing, many
experts were embracing the idea that IQ tests accurately measure intelligence.
According to one survey, most experts “seem to believe that intelligence tests
are doing a good job measuring intelligence, as they would define it.” [2]
In the survey of 661 social scientists, 80 percent of the respondents said IQ
tests effectively measure at least one important element of intelligence --
abstract reasoning. The survey also showed, however, that many experts feel the
tests don't fully measure other key aspects of intelligence, such as creativity.

Jensen's view that IQ is largely inherited is finding wider
acceptance. Jensen's position has been reinforced by studies of twins raised
apart. [3] (See story, p. 662.) While the
findings are uncertain, at best, scientific journals nonetheless are crowded
with new studies finding correlations between biological activity in the brain
and IQ score.

Today, in most U.S. school districts, students take at least two
multiple-choice IQ tests during their early school years. While the tests carry
less weight than they did a decade ago, educators still find them useful. High
scores can still be the ticket to America's own brand of privileged education --
public school classes for the gifted or expensive private schools geared to high
achievers. At the other end of the spectrum, individual IQ tests administered by
school psychologists are frequently used to diagnose learning disabilities and
mental retardation.

During the Great Society era of the 1960s, the founders of
programs like Head Start hoped to raise the IQs of poor children, many of them
black, with early education and extra doses of parenting and nutrition. [4]
But Arthur Jensen suggested that the gap between the races couldn't be closed by
such programs because variability in IQ stemmed mainly from genetic factors.

Today, Jensen, a professor of educational psychology at the
University of California-Berkeley, is even more convinced that biology causes
the 15-point gap in the average scores of blacks and whites. “I think it's
probably largely a genetic difference between the racial groups,” he says.

But even those who credit biology's role in intelligence say it
doesn't fully explain the difference between the IQ scores of blacks and whites.
If biology explains even half the story, they say, environmental conditions --
inferior schooling, limited exposure to middle-class culture and the low status
of blacks in American society -- may well explain the other half.

With so many varieties of intelligence, Gardner says that new
ways of testing will help educators find bright children even among those who
would have scored just average on traditional intelligence tests. “Where
individuals differ,” he argues, “is in the strength of these intelligences.”
[5]

Stephen J. Ceci, a professor of developmental psychology at
Cornell University, is among the critics of traditional testing. “I believe IQ
is an achievement test,” he says, “and like all other achievement tests it's
directly sensitive to things kids are learning in school. If you take
college-prep math, you're going to do better on college math achievement tests
than if you don't. And there's nothing mysterious or magical about that. But
once you call something an IQ test, it connotes that it's a measure of some
inherent or native ability that's impervious to schooling.”

In a review of 200 studies, Ceci found that IQ scores rise with
the amount of time children spend in school, regardless of the quality of
schooling. The finding runs counter to the traditional view of IQ as a stable,
unchanging measure of intelligence throughout a child's school career. [6]
Similarly, suggests Ceci, certain kinds of logical thinking measured by IQ tests
may be much more familiar to white children than to black children because of
their different cultural backgrounds.

Dissidents like Ceci and Gardner are up against 70 years of data
supporting the validity of IQ tests as predictors of academic and job success.
IQ scores have forecast students' grades in school, postal workers' accuracy in
sorting mail and military recruits' ability to pilot a tank. [7]

Some IQ advocates suspect that Gardner's broader social agenda
-- finding disadvantaged students with special talent and reforming schools --
is driving his scientific arguments. “Are we just giving the label ‘intelligence'
to aptitudes in order to democratize the notion of intelligence?” asks Linda
S. Gottfredson, a professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the
University of Delaware. “It's not egalitarian to say some people are smarter
than others. That's why I think multiple intelligence is so popular. It allows
some people to be smarter in some ways and some people to be smarter in other
ways.”

Educators who are testing alternative theories of intelligence
in the schools admit they are stumbling through uncharted territory. Indeed,
they have yet to produce the hard data to challenge the IQ test's supremacy. All
they have are some heartwarming anecdotes about bright children from poor
backgrounds who were overlooked by teachers trained in the old definition of
intelligence. Nonetheless, they raise intriguing questions about the true nature
of intelligence and our ability to discern it in individuals.

As educators, psychologists and social scientists work to make
educational tests more accurate tools for predicting success among the nation's
increasingly diverse student populace, these are some of the key questions they
are asking:

Is IQ testing a valid measure of intelligence?

The current debate over IQ testing is but the latest -- and most
sophisticated -- installment of the so-called “nature-nurture” argument.
Back in the 1960s, many psychologists believed that environmental changes, such
as improved education, nutrition and parenting, could enhance children's
intelligence. But the environmentalists lost steam when “nurturing” programs
like Head Start failed to raise IQs. Meanwhile, studies of twins, adopted
children and the brain added to the evidence that biological and genetic factors
-- in other words, nature -- played key roles in determining intelligence.

The mounting biological evidence confronted the
environmentalists with a difficult empirical task, says Case Western Reserve
University psychologist Douglas K. Detterman, who edits the journal
Intelligence. Proving the influence of a person's surroundings is extremely
difficult, he notes, because “the environment is so chaotic and diverse.” On
the other hand, the intelligence tests marketed to schools still deliver the
goods. “The [IQ] tests still predict who will do well in school and who won't,”
he says. “The tests still empirically work.”

The rift between psychologists over the value of IQ tests stems
from a stark difference in the way they define intelligence: One camp sees a
central, dominant intelligence, the other envisions multiple types of
intelligence.

The first camp believes that a predominant form of general
intelligence determines, in essence, whether a person is “smart.” These IQ
traditionalists, who offer evidence that neurological and genetic factors
underlie intelligence, belong to what Howard Gardner calls the “tough-minded”
wing of intelligence studies. Gardner's own “tender-minded” faction,
favoring cultural and social explanations of intelligence, sees intelligence as
a multi-faceted phenomenon that cannot be captured by a single IQ snapshot. [8]

The primary evidence put forward for one overarching kind of
intelligence is that an individual's scores on various kinds of tests usually
correlate positively with one another, no matter what the subject matter: A
person who scores above average (or below average) on the verbal part of an IQ
test will generally score above average (or below average) on the math part.

When British psychologist Charles Edward Spearman noticed this
correlation near the turn of the century, he hypothesized that a general
intelligence, measured in common by all the tests, drove these correlations. He
dubbed this defining characteristic of intelligence as, for general
intelligence.

“It's really a property of the brain,” maintains Arthur
Jensen, who has correlated the component of IQ scores with electrical activity
in the brain, reaction times in push-button exercises and the rate at which the
brain uses glucose during an IQ test.

Similarly, artists and other creative types don't necessarily
excel on IQ tests, Sternberg maintains, because they “test a narrow construct.
And the results are taken as if it tells you everything you need to know about
intelligence.”

Weighing against Sternberg's theory are stacks of military data,
some in volumes the size of an urban telephone book, showing positive
correlations between the aptitude scores of new recruits and their performance
in training and on the job. General intelligence scores -- as opposed to scores
of mechanical or spatial aptitude, for example -- have proven the best predictor
of job performance in studies of more than 7,000 pilot and navigator trainees. [9]

In short, says Linda Gottfredson, who has analyzed the
occupational data collected by the Army and other employers, the more mentally
complex the job, the more important IQ scores become in determining job
performance. Gottfredson says her studies support the view that practical
skills, as defined by Sternberg, do not stand apart from the general
intelligence measured by IQ tests. Rather, she argues, general intelligence is
the “enabling condition” that gives an individual the judgment necessary to
become a successful entrepreneur or business manager. [10]

The predictive power of such tests, while considered strong by
some social scientists, is nowhere near perfect. “There are too many people
with sky-high IQs who just totally fail in their lives,” Sternberg contends,
“and too many people with low test scores that succeed.”

Whether IQ tests can ferret out creative talent is among the
hottest issues. Studies from the 1950s found that creative individuals tended to
score high in IQ, but Sternberg isn't impressed. He scoffs, “The kinds of
measures [of creativity] that were used in the 1950s were, ‘Here's a paper
clip. Think of unusual uses for the paper clip.' That's going to correlate
highly with IQ tests because that's the same [kind of question] as the IQ test.”

Sternberg has developed his own test. It asks youngsters to
demonstrate creative talents with offbeat tasks like writing a TV ad for
Brussels sprouts or devising a plan to detect extraterrestrial aliens. Sternberg
says he has identified youngsters who score high on creativity but low on the
analytical skills tapped by traditional IQ tests. In a pilot study of 60 high
school students who took college- level courses at Yale last summer, Sternberg
found that youngsters who were identified in tests as either creative or
practical performed better when teaching was targeted to their thinking style.

Countering Jensen's biological studies of IQ, Gardner marshals
his own neurological evidence to show that intelligence is multifaceted. He
points to victims of stroke and brain damage who continue to perform normally in
some intellectual areas even after losing the functions usually associated with
the damaged part of the brain. In the words of Harvard psychologist Sheldon H.
White, current scientific evidence suggests the brain is “not one computer but
a set of computers which crosstalk with one another.”

School psychologists who administer IQ tests often downplay
their importance. “They're not really tests of intelligence,” says Kevin P.
Dwyer, a school psychologist in Montgomery County, Md. “They're tests of a
small sample of some of the behaviors people need to learn academic material.”

While IQ tests can be useful in diagnosing learning problems,
Dwyer believes that observing a child in the classroom over time may provide an
equally accurate profile. Schools rely heavily on IQ tests to determine
eligibility for gifted and special-education programs, Dwyer says, because they
save time and money over long-term observation. “The painful thing for me is
how often people will take the test and all they want is the IQ number, and they
don't care how the kid got there. That drives me berserk. These are human
beings, and they're basing their future on an IQ number.”

Harvard's White, who is writing a history of developmental
psychology, considers IQ tests “archaic” measures, based on the embryonic
psychology of the early 1900s. Moreover, he says, the tests have never been
modernized to incorporate current scientific understanding of thinking
processes. “This monolithic IQ is a relic of a eugenic fantasy that was very
strong at the turn of the century, and it has done over the course of this
century more and more damage,” he says.

Do IQ and aptitude tests close or open doors to opportunity?

The staunchest supporters of IQ and aptitude tests argue that
they reflect merit, not class. In the words of Fortune magazine columnist Daniel
Seligman, author of a new book on intelligence testing, “The connection
between IQ and achievement has one positive implication: It tells us that people
at the top in American life are probably there because they are more intelligent
than others -- which is doubtless the way most of us think it should be.” [11]

That kind of statement is exactly what makes IQ testing so
potentially divisive, says Sheldon White. “What you're dealing with is a
decaying remnant of establishmentarian thinking at the turn of the century,”
he retorts.

In fact, the history of intelligence testing has two interwoven
and conflicting strands: On the one hand, a school-reform movement early in the
century supported tests that would categorize children from varying social and
immigrant backgrounds in order to place them at educational levels appropriate
to their abilities. However, some of the tests' originators were outspoken
eugenicists interested in weeding out what they saw as feeble-minded individuals
of inferior racial stock.

“This transformation of the American educational system into
something driven by these individual differences is an extraordinary
accomplishment. In my judgment, it's comparable to the fall of monarchies and
the rise of republics,” Herrnstein observes.

Yet today, critics charge, such standardized tests are having
the opposite effect, labeling disadvantaged children as failures prematurely and
creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In Boston, the process starts when second-graders take a
standardized test that entitles qualified students to enroll in “advanced work”
classes. Those classes prepare students to compete for admission to Boston's
elite “exam schools,” where about 80 percent of students go on to college,
compared with 20 percent for other Boston public schools.

“The test becomes a very strong gatekeeper based on race and
class,” says Monty Neill, associate director of FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.,
advocacy organization critical of standardized testing. “It's quite clear that
to a great extent these tests measure family background and previous experience.”
IQ tests play the same function in deciding who gets into gifted and talented
programs across the country, he adds.

The issue of whether the tests help or hurt children from poor
backgrounds was placed in sharp relief by a recent California case involving
black students. Ironically, their parents had sued the state because the
children had been unable to take an IQ test. California had banned IQ testing of
black students after a 1979 court ruling declared that the tests were racially
biased and resulted in disproportionately high numbers of blacks being placed in
classes for the educable mentally retarded (see p. 660).

Mary Amaya, a Hispanic parent, filed the suit after she received
a letter from the school district recommending a special-education assessment
for one of her sons. In a postscript, the district added that the boy, whose
father is black, could get an IQ test only if Amaya registered him as Hispanic.

Amaya had found the IQ test helpful in diagnosing learning
problems for her older son before the ban took place. She considered the new
policy discriminatory, said her attorney, Mark Bredemeier, of the Landmark Legal
Foundation, a conservative group in Kansas City, Mo. “Minority families are
saying, ‘We appreciate your wanting to protect us from ourselves,'” said
Bredemeier. “‘All we ask for is the right to make our own decisions on these
tests.'”

Last August a U.S. district court ruled that black parents
should be permitted to get their children tested. The decision is being appealed
by the plaintiffs in the original 1979 case.

Although Bredemeier argues that students needing special
education are no longer placed in racially isolated classes, Neill insists that
special classes still constitute a dead end. “All the large-scale studies have
shown most placements in special education guarantee you'll never get a
postsecondary education,” he says. And blacks, according to FairTest, are
three times as likely to be placed in special-education classes as whites.

Are IQ and aptitude tests culturally biased?

An African chieftain in exotic regalia chastises a visiting
scholar: “You can't build a hut,” goes the cartoon's caption, “you don't
know how to find edible roots, you know nothing about predicting the weather --
you do terribly on our IQ test.” [13]

Much like the visiting scholar in the cartoon, minority children
taking intelligence tests often find themselves transported to an exotic and
incomprehensible world of middle-class symbols and words, critics of such tests
believe. (See box, p. 657.)

“Children from different cultural and ethnic groups are not
given fair measure by the tests,” says Patricia O'Connell Ross, director of
the U.S. Department of Education's Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Education
Program. The Washington-based program has a congressional mandate to broaden the
diversity of American children in gifted programs. “We're certainly opposed to
the IQ test as a singular means by which you identify kids,” she says.

Because blacks consistently score an average of 15-18 points
lower than whites, the question of cultural bias won't go away. Although whites
are generally more affluent and better educated than blacks, family income
apparently does not account for the difference. When blacks and whites of
similar economic backgrounds are compared, the gap is only reduced slightly --
from 15 points to 10 or 12 points. And tests of black and white children from
different socioeconomic status (SES) repeatedly find that low-SES white children
score as high as high-SES black children. [14]

Though many blacks will score at the top of the IQ spectrum and
many whites score at the bottom, the practical significance of the difference
lies in how many blacks and whites fall at extreme ends of the spectrum. IQ
cutoffs can decide whether one is admitted into the Army for example. The armed
forces are required to screen out the lowest 10 percent of the IQ distribution
-- those who score below 75. Only one in 20 white Americans scores below the
cutoff, compared with one in five black Americans. [15]

In the scientific community, the old debate over IQ-test bias --
Are individual questions racially and ethnically slanted? -- has shifted, notes
Michael Feuer, staff director of the National Research Council's new Board on
Testing and Assessment (see p. 666)* Psychologists are beginning to ask whether
tests are biased toward the analytical thinking characteristic of mainstream
test designers. *

For example, an Educational Testing Service (ETS) study found
that males score an average of 35 points higher on the math part of the
Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) than females, even when the two sexes get the
same grades in their college math courses. [16]
Some observers theorize that males solve problems with analytical, deductive
kinds of reasoning while females tend to approach them with a more innovative,
open-minded flair that multiple-choice tests can't capture.

Since the 1970s, testing companies have routinely screened
questions for bias with culturally diverse groups of experts and lay people,
according to Barbara Plake, director of the Buros Institute of Mental
Measurement at the University of Nebraska. “You tend to see far fewer overtly
biased items,” concedes Neill of FairTest. “But to say you've removed the
overtly biased items does not mean you've removed the cultural bias on the
tests, because you still have questions that assume the norms of being are white
and middle-class.”

As for why middle-class black children still score lower than
whites of similar background, Neill says, “Our argument is that there's a
combined effect of both class and race. Even higher-income blacks are still
segregated and still come from cultural-subgroup experiences.”

Further support for this explanation comes from anthropologist
John U. Ogbu of the University of California-Berkeley, who has studied IQ scores
and school performance of low-status groups around the world. Ogbu points to the
Burakamin, the contemporary descendants of Japanese untouchables, who score
lower in IQ and perform more poorly in school than mainstream Japanese, even
though they are racially identical.

However, when Burakamin families immigrate to the United States,
where their historic caste status is unknown, they perform as well as other
Asians in school. Similarly, argues Ogbu, the inferior school and IQ performance
of blacks can be explained by the limited economic opportunities they perceive
for themselves in a society that still relegates them to a low-caste status. [17]

Diehard IQ adherents dismiss such explanations of the
black-white gap. “The cultural-bias explanation will not fly,” writes
Seligman, whose book concludes that recognizing the power of IQ to predict job
performance could boost the nation's gross national product (GNP). “[I]t
collides with the fact that blacks do relatively well on the culturally loaded
verbal sections of IQ tests; it is the subtests that are virtually devoid of
cultural content -- those emphasizing abstract-reasoning ability -- on which
blacks do worst.” [18]

Yet the concept of abstractness is “exceedingly ill-wrought,”
retorts Ceci of Cornell. He argues that many of the so-called “abstract”
questions on IQ tests are in fact skills taught in school.

In addition, Ceci disputes the oft-repeated claim of IQ
adherents that a student's IQ, not family background, is the best predictor of
future income or job success. In a recent study, Ceci and a colleague analyzed
data from Project Talent, a national study by the American Institutes for
Research in Palo Alto, Calif., begun in 1959 that followed the progress of
400,000 high school students into their early 30s. They concluded that family
social origins and education were more influential in predicting future earnings
than IQ. Given a choice between “being born smart or being born rich, one
ought to opt for the latter,” the authors write. [19]

** The
National Research Council is the administrative andanalytical branch of the
National Academy of Sciences andthe National Academy of Engineering.

Background

The roots of intelligence testing lie in the 19th century, when
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution generated fascination with genetics and
natural selection. Although Darwin never applied his theories to psychology, his
cousin, the English scientist Sir Francis Galton, did. Galton is considered the
father of eugenics, the movement devoted to improving humankind through
selective breeding.

In Hereditary Genius, his 1869 study of 977 eminent men, Galton
argued that the status of great men is due to their natural gifts, which can be
traced back through their families. Great human ability, he wrote, “breeds
true.” [20] At his laboratory, Galton
tested visitors' reaction times, color perception and steadiness of hand in the
belief that more-intellectually refined individuals would have keener sensory
capacities.

A competing school of thought about the nature of intelligence
emerged from the work of French psychologist Albert Binet in the 1890s. Binet
argued that mental functioning could only be assessed by looking at more complex
abilities, such as judgment, memory and language.

In 1904, France's minister of public instruction asked Binet and
his student Theodore Simon to develop a test to identify retarded
schoolchildren. The so-called Binet-Simon scale that was developed in 1905 is
considered the first reliable intelligence test. *

Binet and Simon revised the test in 1908 to identify children
who would profit from further instruction. Although the test was a great success
-- and served as the foundation for American IQ testing -- Binet kept working to
refine the definition of intelligence throughout the rest of his life. Much like
today's multiple-intelligence psychologists, he sought a more sophisticated
understanding of mental capacity. [21]

In 1916, Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman published his own
revision of the Binet-Simon scale.* Terman's test, known as the Stanford-Binet,
is the standard by which all later intelligence tests have been judged. In the
opening chapter of his manual for test users, Terman voiced the conflicting
impulses -- those of both eugenicist and egalitarian -- that have characterized
the history of the intelligence-testing movement. *

Speaking as a eugenicist, he asserted that identifying retarded
students would “ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of
feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime,
pauperism and industrial inefficiency.” At the same time, Terman the
egalitarian said the test would help schools respond appropriately to bright
children and to assign all children to the appropriate school grades. [22]

Expanding Use of Intelligence Testing in the U.S.

Terman's revised test marked the beginning of large-scale
testing in the United States. It coincided with the explosive growth of public
school populations between 1890 and 1915, an influx of immigrant children and
the demise of the ungraded one-room schoolhouse. Terman's test appeared to
answer the schools' new need to classify children according to their skill
levels.

The rapid expansion of intelligence testing was spurred by the
Army's interest during World War I. Terman and a group of colleagues were asked
to help the Army develop group intelligence tests to determine eligibility and
to assign new recruits to jobs. These tests, known as the Alpha and Beta scales,
were administered to more than 1 million recruits during World War I. Terman's
original test had been administered individually, precluding its use on a
massive scale. Arthur Otis, a student of Terman's, developed a paper-and-pencil
version, permitting it to be taken by large groups and graded objectively.

After the war, schools and industries administered the new group
tests in growing numbers. School reformers supported them as the rational
application of science to educating children of differing abilities. By 1921, 2
million American schoolchildren were being tested annually, primarily to
determine academic tracking. [23]

Controversies Erupt

But the Army tests also set off the first public controversy
about IQ testing. The Army data reported that members of immigrant groups scored
lower than native-born Americans and that the most recently arrived immigrants
from Southern and Eastern Europe scored lower than those from Northern and
Western Europe. Black recruits scored lowest of all. These data were seized upon
by a small but vocal group of eugenicists led by Princeton University
psychologist Carl Brigham, who argued that the nation needed to improve its
breeding stock. Similar arguments figured in congressional debate over
legislation to restrict immigration. [24]

In 1922, columnist Walter Lippman launched the first popular
attack on IQ testing. In several articles in The New Republic, Lippman argued
the tests did not measure innate intelligence or heredity. He warned that the
tests could “lead to an intellectual caste system in which the task of
education had given way to the doctrine of predestination and infant damnation.”
[25] But by the mid-1920s, the
controversy had died down, and intelligence testing continued to expand.

During the 1920s, psychologists refined the tests, becoming
increasingly sophisticated in their statistical techniques for measuring their
reliability and introducing machine-scoring techniques. In 1926, the College
Entrance Examination Board developed the Scholastic Aptitude Test, recently
renamed the Scholastic Assessment Test, as an “IQ test for college-aged
subjects” in response to requests from colleges. The purpose was to identify
the “diamond in the rough,” someone who could overcome poor preparation and
learn a great deal if admitted. [26]

By 1930, Terman's intelligence and achievement tests had sales
of an estimated 2 million copies a year. By World War II, intelligence testing
had become firmly ensconced in American society, and some 10 million Army
recruits had been classified into jobs using an ability test. Testing surged
again in the 1950s, after the Soviet satellite Sputnik raised concerns about
America's ability to find and train the rocket scientists of the future.

While the tests rewarded those who were poor but acculturated,
such as the first-generation sons of European Jewish immigrants, they continued
to relegate those outside mainstream society -- primarily blacks and new
immigrants -- to the bottom of the economic ladder, critics of the tests now
say. The birth of the civil rights movement in the 1960s raised new questions
about whether the tests exacerbated racial inequality.

Court Challenges

In a landmark 1967 case, Hobson v. Hansen, black parents in
Washington, D.C., challenged the school system's use of intelligence tests to
assign students to academic tracks, charging that the policy was racially
biased. The D.C. Circuit Court found that because the test had been calibrated
for a white, middle-class group, it was inappropriate to use, and it struck down
the city's tracking system. That case marked a new reluctance by public schools
to use intelligence tests to make routine educational decisions affecting most
children.

The issue arose again in 1971, when the parents of seven black
children sued the state of California, claiming that their children had been
wrongly assigned to classes for the mentally retarded based on culturally biased
IQ tests. In 1979, 9th U.S. District Judge Robert F. Peckham ruled in the Larry
P. v. Wilson Riles case that the plaintiffs had been placed in racially
isolated, dead-end classes from which few students ever returned to the regular
classroom. Peckham's ruling banned the use of IQ tests to place blacks in
retarded classes. In 1986, he expanded the ban to the placement of black
children in all special-education classes and programs.

Also in 1971, the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. decision by the U.S.
Supreme Court struck a death blow at general aptitude tests administered by
employers. In its ruling, the court placed the burden of proof on the employer
to show that any test used to screen applicants was a “reasonable measure of
job performance” and would not harm black job placement because of unequal
test scores between racial groups. Under the Griggs standard, lawyers have
overturned hundreds of employment tests used by civil service and private
employers. Today, most employers are reluctant to use such tests, experts say.

Reaction to Jensen's Theories

Meanwhile, a simmering academic debate over the racial
implications of IQ testing came to public attention after the Westinghouse
Learning Corporation concluded in a 1968 report that Head Start hadn't produced
long-term gains in the IQ scores of disadvantaged preschoolers. The next year,
Arthur Jensen sparked a storm of controversy in the scholarly and popular press
when he blamed the differences in black and white IQ scores on heredity.

Jensen has compared IQ scores of blacks and whites to the speed
with which they react to simple stimuli, such as pushing a button when a light
goes off. He finds a high correlation between IQ scores and these response
times. [27] That research supports his
view that the racial difference is predominantly genetic, he argues, because “there's
some common factor in the brain that causes both reaction time and IQ tests.”

Public acceptance of IQ has waned considerably since the Jensen
controversy. In 1973 and 1974, news stories reported that a British
psychologist, Sir Cyril Burt, had faked data in twin studies showing that
intelligence was inherited. The stories -- since disputed -- added to the cloud
looming over IQ studies with a hereditarian, or genetic, bent.

Over the past decade, a new school of psychologists, led by
Harvard's Howard Gardner, has spurned IQ tests as reflections of an outdated,
narrow view of intelligence. In 1983, Gardner captured attention with his book
Frames of Mind, which advanced his theory of multiple intelligences. He was the
latest in a long line of thinkers who have argued since the 1900s that there are
from four up to 300 forms of human intelligence.

But Gardner's views directly challenged the philosophical basis
of IQ testing, first articulated by British psychologist Charles Spearman in
1904, that there is one predominant form of general intelligence. Adherents of
that philosophy, led by Arthur Jensen, have been equally active in pursuing IQ's
genetic and biological basis over the past decade. Ironically, the Jensen camp's
research, though sophisticated in its use of modern medical technology, is
reminiscent of Galton's simple sensory-response tests as the true measure of
human intelligence.

*Test
scores were obtained by comparing students' mentalage (derived from the number
of items that should beanswered correctly by a normal child at that age) with
theirchronological age. Today's Intelligence Quotient or IQderived from this
measure. It is calculated by dividing anindividual's mental age by his real age
and multiplying by100. An IQ of 100 (in which the mental and chronological
ageare the same) is considered average. An IQ of 130 or higheris generally
considered in the gifted range -- and from 140and up in the “genius”
category. Children with IQs below 70-75 are considered mentally retarded by most
school systems.

** The test
had been translated into English in 1910 by HenryGoddard, director of research
at a school for the retardedin Vineland, N.J. He was impressed by how well it
accordedwith his intuitive judgments about who was “feeble-minded.”.

Chronology

19th CenturyCharles Darwin's theory of evolution is used to
explain differences in mental abilities and to rally support for eugenics, or
selective breeding.

1859Darwin publishes Origin of Species.

1869Sir Francis Galton publishes a genealogical
study of famous men, Hereditary Genius, supporting his view that intelligence is
largely the result of inherited abilities.

1900sThe first intelligence tests provide the
foundation for the IQ tests commonly used today.

1905Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon publish their
first intelligence scale for classifying the mentally retarded.

1908Binet and Simon revise their scale to measure
children's readiness for school.

1910Henry Goddard translates the 1908 Binet-Simon
scale into English.

1916Lewis Terman publishes the Stanford Revision of
the Binet-Simon scale, marking the start of large-scale individual intelligence
testing in the U.S.

1917Arthur Otis develops the first group
intelligence test.

1918-1919The Army administers intelligence tests to more
than 1 million recruits.

1920s-1940sAs the racial and ethnic implications of
widespread military testing become public, IQ tests come under attack.

1970s-1980sLawsuits charging that IQ testing discriminates
against minorities lead to diminished use of IQ tests in schools and workplace.
Psychologist Howard Gardner proposes his theory of multiple intelligences.

About three-quarters of the nation's school districts give IQ or
aptitude tests two or three times during a child's school career, estimates
Professor Carolyn M. Callahan of the Curry School of Education at the University
of Virginia. In most cases, says Callahan, the test is intended to inform
teachers whether students are working at the level indicated by their aptitude
scores and to spot those needing remedial education.

In general, intelligence scores have the most influence on those
at the high and low ends of the spectrum -- the gifted and the learning
disabled. For the majority in the middle, group intelligence testing no longer
has a key role in determining a child's tracking, says Harvard's Sheldon White.
“What's happening now,” he says, “is IQ tests are not taken as seriously
and are not used in the more enlightened schools to put kids in special classes
without some kind of ‘contestation process'” from parents or teachers who
may disagree with the placement. But teachers still use IQ scores as an
objective back-up to their recommendations, according to White and other
observers.

Intelligence tests play a major role in admission to gifted
tracks. The majority of school districts used them to identify gifted children,
according to a recent national survey. [28]
Most use the scores in combination with other criteria, such as teacher
recommendations.

“There's a trend toward placing much less emphasis on
standardized intelligence testing” in such admissions decisions, Callahan
says, considering it as only one part of a child's school profile. Some schools
are experimenting with “performance testing,” which observes directly how
children perform in such areas as science experiments, creative writing or art.
(See story, p. 654.)

Since the 1980s, however, something of a backlash has emerged
against the blanket condemnation of IQ tests. Last August, District Judge Robert
F. Peckham rescinded his ban on testing black students in California for
placement in special education. The ruling came in response to a suit brought by
parents of black students who wanted their children tested as part of a
special-education assessment. The parents' attorney, Mark Bredemeier, said his
clients viewed the modern special education offered by California schools today
as helpful to children with learning disabilities, not a dead-end track, as
parents contended in the original 1979 Larry P. case.

However, IQ testing in California faces an uncertain future,
since the state education department has announced its intention to develop an
alternative form of assessment for all races. Some California school districts
have already dropped IQ testing altogether. Meanwhile, Peckham's ruling is being
appealed to the 9th Circuit by the original Larry P. plaintiffs, who initiated
the ban on IQ testing.

End of “Race-Norming”

For decades, state and local employment offices have used the
U.S. Department of Labor's General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) to match up job
applicants and employers. However, the test became the focus of controversy
recently because some 35 state offices used “race- norming.” The practice
allows black and Hispanic applicants to be referred to jobs on the basis of
their test-score ranking within their own racial groups, not the entire
population of job-seekers. Because blacks and Hispanics have lower average
scores than whites, they may be referred to employers and hired before whites
with higher scores. [29]

Critics charged that race-norming unfairly excluded better-
qualified white workers from jobs, and Congress outlawed the practice in the
1991 Civil Rights Act. In December 1991, the Labor Department discontinued the
controversial test “because of concerns over whether the test adequately
serves all individuals, including minorities, veterans, those with disabilities
and other workers.” [30] The department
is redesigning the test.

However, defenders of race-norming saw it as a counterweight to
the inequality of opportunity produced by the GATB, which, like IQ tests,
results in black-white scoring gaps. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights
Under Law, a leading critic of the test, maintained that it merely identified
good test-takers, not necessarily those who would make the best employees. [31]

Such traditional-style aptitude tests, say theorists like
Sternberg and Gardner, fail to measure the more creative thinking needed in the
modern workplace. Their theories hold enormous appeal for educators interested
in unearthing the talents of poor and minority schoolchildren, who often perform
poorly on IQ tests and similar pencil-and-paper tests.

Putting Theories to Work

To identify children for its gifted track, the Charlotte-
Mecklenburg, N.C., school system has started testing for Gardner's multiple
intelligences as an alternative to IQ tests. In the 1992-1993 academic year, its
first year of experimentation, 17 percent of second-graders identified as gifted
were black, compared with about 10 percent under the old method in previous
years.

“Once again, we seem to be in a crisis mode in this country
because we believe we are not going to have a work force that can handle changes
in technology and changes in economic competition,” says Michael Feuer of the
National Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment. The board, a
scientific forum that advises employers, educators and the military, is expected
to consider seriously the experimental-testing approaches inspired by the
multiple-intelligence theorists.

But the new school of intelligence theory faces an uphill battle
in convincing psychologists and school administrators that what it describes can
be reliably measured. “It's another educational fad, but the evidence is soft,”
says Case Western Reserve University psychologist Detterman. Detterman's own
current research has a biological bent, relating intelligence to specific sets
of genes.

According to Fortune's Seligman, “The stated premise of
affirmative action is that minorities have subpar economic performance because
of discrimination, and I think the IQ data are putting forward an alternative or
perhaps a supplementary explanation. It isn't just discrimination.”

A longstanding claim among social scientists has been that
intelligence has little value for predicting differences in job
performance. This claim has been laid to rest, however, by meta- analyses
of the many personnel selection studies during the last half century. The
evidence shows that intelligence predicts differences in performance in
all jobs, and it predicts especially well in complex, high-level jobs.
Intelligence is not the only correlate of job performance, of course, but
it is the single most useful predictor.

Most of the studies included in those meta-analyses used
supervisor ratings as the indicator of job performance, because such
ratings are usually all that are available. Some people have objected that
supervisor ratings are subject to considerable bias, and they have
predicted that intelligence would have little relation to more objective
measures of job performance. However, recent evidence indicates that
intelligence predicts performance on objective work samples even better
than it does supervisor ratings....

There are a variety of other arguments disputing the
importance of IQ in the workplace, but I would like to focus here on the
set of expectations that I refer to as the training hypothesis....
Intelligence has no direct impact on job performance [the theory goes],
only an indirect one. Differences in job performance can be traced to
differences in job skills and knowledge, and differences in skills and
knowledge can, in turn, be traced to differences in education, training
and experience....

A variant of this argument is the popular lay theory that
job experience is a great equalizer. Differences in intelligence may lead
to differences in performance among recent hires, it is conceded, but
those differences wash out as workers become more experienced on the
job....

The first problem with the training hypothesis is that its
premise is implausible. It is not feasible to break the link between
intelligence and performance in training. More intelligent people learn
complex tasks and knowledge faster than do less intelligent people, and
the more complex the task, the larger the absolute differences are in the
amount of time individuals require to master the task....

At best, training produces mastery of (actually, minimum
or average competence in) only some fraction of a job, and brighter people
will master the remaining fraction faster or better than will less
intelligent people.

Psychological ScienceFebruary 1993.Conventional intelligence tests were originally designed by Alfred
Binet and Theodore Simon to predict performance in school, and they
provide fairly credible, although certainly incomplete, prediction of such
performance, as well as of performance in job training. But their
prediction of performance on the job is weaker....

Why is prediction of job performance by intelligence tests
modest, or at least more modest than is prediction of academic
performance? We believe ... that there are two important reasons. First,
academic and practical problems have different characteristics.... As a
result, tests of academic problem-solving ability result in lesser
prediction of practical job-related performance than of academic or even
job- learning performance.

We also believe that academic and practical intelligence
are rather different in kind. In academic intelligence, the relevant
knowledge is of content and rules, and is formal and out in the open. It
is learned primarily by reading and listening, and it is highly valued in
the schools. It is measured by conventional ability tests....

In practical intelligence, in contrast, the relevant
knowledge is of norms, and the knowledge is informal and often tacit. It
is knowledge about, rather than of, a discipline. It is learned primarily
by observation and modeling, and it is devalued in most schools. It is
probably best measured by simulations....

We believe the key to practical intelligence is what
Michael Polanyi has called tacit knowledge, the practical know-how one
needs for success on the job. Often it is not openly expressed or stated,
and it is usually not taught directly....

Tacit knowledge increases, on average, with job
experience, but is not a direct function of job experience. What matters
most is not how much experience a person has, but how well the person
utilizes the experience to acquire and use tacit knowledge. Tacit
knowledge is not a fancy proxy for IQ. It almost never correlates
significantly with IQ.... Tacit knowledge is not a proxy for measures of
personality, cognitive style, or interpersonal orientation, either....

We are not condemning conventional theories or tests of
intelligence, but in the prediction of job performance, we do believe that
they need to be supplemented by broader ability measures.

Responding to dissatisfaction with current tests used in schools
and the workplace, educators and theorists are expressing growing interest in
new forms of intelligence assessment. “In the educational community,” says
Feuer, “there's a growing sense that these [traditional IQ] tests are picking
up on a small fraction of the abilities we want young people to acquire in
school and that they're used prematurely to label children as unable to learn.”

Because multiple-choice tests tend to measure “bit-by-bit
knowledge,” he says, some experts fear they drive teaching in a similar
direction. In the writing component of traditional intelligence tests, for
example, students simply identify the components of good and bad writing but do
not have to demonstrate that they can actually write. While this may be a good
test of proofreading, it's not necessarily a test of writing skill, critics say.

And while aptitude tests tend to focus attention on those at the
very high and low ends of the analytical spectrum, they do not give much
information about the many students who score in the middle, nor do they give
information about how to help them achieve. “We could be doing a better job
for the 30 to 40 percent of the population not in the faster tracks,” says
Feuer. “That's a lot of what the reform movement is about today -- elevating
the achievement of kids in the middle track.”

“Performance testing” is the term for a new kind of
assessment that would look at what kids can actually do and how they do it in a
learning situation. It can entail essay writing instead of multiple- choice
questions, observing a child conducting a scientific experiment or studying a
student's creative work over time. As of 1991, according to the Office of
Technology Assessment (OTA), 36 states were evaluating student writing by using
direct writing samples, and 21 states had implemented other types of performance
assessments. [32]

The Portfolio Approach

One of the most intriguing approaches uses multifaceted
portfolios of children's work -- including drawings, creative writing and
arithmetic problems -- to study how well a child grasps new concepts and uses
them over time. In 1992, five states (Alaska, California, North Carolina, Rhode
Island and Vermont) were using portfolios as mandatory, voluntary or
experimental components of statewide educational-assessment programs. [33]

Although the concept is new to elementary schools, portfolios
have been used in the college-level Advanced Placement (AP) examination for
studio art for nearly 20 years. The assessment consists entirely of artwork,
judged by a jury of art teachers who independently score the portfolio on a
scale of 1 to 5. There are no essays or questions to answer.

At the Educational Testing Service, which administers the AP
exam, Michael Ziki, executive director of training and technical assistance,
says it would not be easy to transfer a portfolio approach to the SATs. “The
cost would be tremendous,” he says, because people rather than machines would
have to do the scoring. And there's the question of reliability. “Would the
same two people looking at the portfolio give it the same score without a lot of
training?” he asks. Ziki concedes that the SAT is limited to “verbal and
quantitative skills. You can list 10,000 other things it does not measure.”

The questions Ziki raises about portfolio assessments are often
asked about the new elementary school testing approaches based on Howard
Gardner's multiple intelligence theory. In one exercise developed by Gardner's
Project Spectrum, students are given the parts of an oil pump to put together.
Sometimes they are handed gears and grinders to see what they will do with them.
*

The primary challenge with these novel tests, says Caroline
Callahan, is to train teachers to use them so that schools consider them as
reliable as pencil-and-paper tests. “Standardized tests are easy,” she says.
“You open up the book. The other stuff takes a lot of time.” She concedes
that such innovative testing “won't go anywhere unless the research is done.
It's going to take people a long time to convince schools this does yield more
data than an intelligence test.”

Many of Gardner's followers believe that his approach will
identify more talented minority and low-income children than traditional IQ
tests. But there are doubts. For one thing, notes OTA, a test based on human
judgment rather than machine scoring could “exacerbate differences between
groups of test-takers from different backgrounds.” [34]

The president of the San Diego City Board of Education also
worries that portfolios could penalize minority children. “It's all
subjective,” Shirley Weber has noted. [35]While
the evidence is both sparce and convicting, some studies report that the gaps
between scores of blacks and whites are about the same on essay writing as on
multiple-choice tests of reading comprehension.

In the long run, the new intelligence theories may have more
impact on the nature of teaching itself, rather than how students are sorted,
says Mindy Kornhaber, who is co-authoring a textbook on intelligence with Howard
Gardner. “If you want engineers,” she says, “you can test for high math
skills, but in theory we think you can also get people who have these spatial
and mathematical skills without the great testing skills. You can also educate
people better if you don't gear everyone's education around paper and pencil.”

While some critics see this approach as special pleading for the
less bright, Kornhaber defends it as part of the great American tradition of
giving people new opportunities “to demonstrate and build their strengths.”

Sarah Glazer is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C., who
reports on education, health and social-policy issues.

[12] Office of Technology Assessment, Testing in American
Schools: Asking the Right Questions, February 1992.

[13] This Sidney
Harris cartoon was cited by Stanford University psychologist Robert Calfee to
illustrate the important role that the cultural context plays in intelligence.
Robert Calfee, “Paper, Pencil, Potential, and Performance,” Current
Directions in Psychological Science, February 1993, pp. 6-7.

Fancher, Raymond E., The
Intelligence Men: Makers of the IQ Controversy, W.W. Norton and Co., 1985. This
is a good, clear explanation of the competing philosophies that gave rise to
intelligence testing, presented in the form of mini- biographies of the major
historical figures from Sir Francis Galton to Arthur Jensen.

Gardner, Howard, Frames
of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books, 1993. In a
new introduction to this 10th anniversary edition, Harvard University
psychologist Gardner defends his theory of multiple intelligences in the face of
conflicting biological evidence.

Gardner, Howard, The
Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Basic Books,
1991. Writing for parents and experts alike, Gardner describes how he
would use his multiple-intelligences theory to reform teaching, encouraging
hands-on, project-oriented activities.

Gould, Stephen Jay, The
Mismeasure of Man, W.W. Norton and Co., 1981. This indictment of the IQ
test and its historical connection to racist philosophies continues to be cited
by both IQ critics and proponents.

Seligman, Daniel, A
Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America, Birch Lane Press, 1992. In
this readable defense of IQ testing, Fortune columnist Seligman argues that a
broad shift to testing in the work force would increase the nation's
productivity by some $50 billion.

Mark and Stanley Rothman,
The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy, Transaction Books, 1988. The
authors contrast press coverage of IQ testing -- which they consider unfairly
negative -- to experts' views -- which are generally positive toward the test.

Cohen, Deborah L., “New
Study Links Lower IQ at Age 5 to Poverty,” Education Week, April 7, 1993, p.
4. A University of Michigan study finds that children who lived in “persistent
poverty” for the first five years of their lives had IQs nine points lower
than those who didn't experience poverty.

Kantrowitz, Barbara, “He's
the Next Best Thing: A Student of Genius,” Newsweek, June 28, 1993, pp. 48-49.
This profile of multiple-intelligences guru Howard Gardner gives a sense
of his cultlike status among admirers.

Wilson, James Q., “Uncommon
Sense about the IQ Debate,” Fortune, Jan. 11, 1993, pp. 99-100. In this
favorable review of Daniel Seligman's book (see above), University of
California-Los Angeles professor Wilson asserts that Americans are uncomfortable
about discussing IQ because it forces them to face facts about inherited
differences in intelligence.

Reports and Studies

Assessment, Technology,
Testing in American Schools: Asking the Right Questions, February 1992. OTA,
a research arm of Congress, discusses the policy implications of new,
experimental testing approaches in this comprehensive report on aptitude and
achievement tests.

Baker, James N., “Battling
the IQ-Test Ban,” Newsweek, July 27, 1987, p. 53. A ruling made by U.S.
District Judge Robert Peckham of California states that IQ tests are racially
and culturally biased. Mary Amaya is fighting for the parents' right to request
IQ tests regardless of race.

Doyle, Jim, “Ban on
Black Students' IQ Tests Overturned,” San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 2, 1992,
p. A1. In a major civil rights ruling, a federal judge in San Francisco
onSept. 1, 1992,repealed his 1986 order that banned the use of IQ tests on black
students in California public schools as a means to identify those who are slow
learners.

Vincent, Ken R., “Black/White
IQ Differences: Does Age Make the Difference?” Journal of Clinical Psychology,
March 1991, pp. 266-270. A study was conducted on IQ differences between
black and white adults and children to determine the possibility of racial bias
of IQ tests. The results show a lessening of racial IQ differences in children.

Genetics and IQ Testing

Cravens, Hamilton, “A
Scientific Project Locked in Time: The Terman Genetic Studies of Genius,
1920s-1950s,” American Psychologist, February 1992, pp. 183-189. Lewis
M. Terman is well-known in the history of U.S. psychology for the Stanford
Revision of the Binet-Simon intelligence tests and the Genetic Studies of Genius
project.

Davis, Richard, “Biological
tests of intelligence as culture fair,” American Psychologist, June 1993, pp.
695-696. For decades, the controversy concerning the viability of IQ
tests has raged unceasingly. It is argued that such biological tests may indeed
be culturally fair.

Influences on IQ Scores

Patricia A.; Just, Marcel
Adam; Shell, Peter, “What One Intelligence Test Measures: A Theoretical
Account of the Processing in the Raven Progressive Matrices Test,”
Psychological Review, July 1990, pp. 404-431. The cognitive processes in
the Raven Progressive Matrices Test are analyzed in terms of which processes
distinguish between higher- scoring and lower-scoring subjects and which
processes are common to all subjects and all items on the test.

“Children's Higher IQ
Is Linked to Breast Milk,” The Washington Post, Jan. 31, 1992, p. A4. A
study of 300 children who were born prematurely suggests that children who were
fed breast milk scored significantly higher on IQ tests than children who
received formula.

“Education That Works,”
Christian Science Monitor, July 6, 1990, p. 20. An editorial supports the
conclusions of a new study of premature babies indicating that a comprehensive
education program beginning just after birth can lead to higher scores on
intelligence tests and fewer behavioral problems.

Henry, Tamara, “Planning
Gives Girls an Intellectual Edge,” USA Today, Nov. 9, 1992, p. D1. A
new intelligence test developed by university psychologists Jack Naglieri and J.
P. Das shows that girls actually may be smarter than boys in early school years
because of a natural ability to plan ahead.

Leon J. Kamin, “Blackness,
deafness, IQ, and g,” Intelligence, January 1993, pp. 37-46. The deaf
data employed by Jensen (1985) and Braden (1984,1989) have been defectively and
inconsistently reported and can provide no support to the claim that black-white
differences in IQ are not environmental in origin, the authors state.

Waite, Teresa L., “Breast
Milk for Premature Babies Tied to Higher Intelligence Scores,” The New York
Times, March 4, 1992, p. C14. According to a new study, children fed
breast milk as premature infants scored significantly higher on intelligence
tests than children also born prematurely who had not received their mothers'
milk.

“Young Children with
Poor Sight Score Higher in IQ Tests,” Guardian, Aug. 21, 1990, p. 6. The
British Association was told recently that poor eyesight in young children is
linked to intelligence, and the difference between shortsighted children and
others could be five or 10 points on the IQ scale.

Intelligence Testing

Flynn, James R., “Massive
IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure,” Psychological Bulletin,
March 1987, pp. 171-191. Data from 14 nations reveal IQ gains as high as
25 points in a single generation. It is suggested that IQ tests do not measure
intelligence but rather a weak causal link to intelligence.

Gardner, Howard, “Developing
the Spectrum of Human Intelligences,” Harvard Educational Review, May 1987,
pp. 187-193. The theory that the standard IQ test is not a valid measure
of intelligence is discussed. Research has explored the possibility that seven
intelligences exist, and should be measured individually.

Levine, Art, “Getting
Smart about IQ,” U.S. News & World Report, Nov. 23, 1987, pp. 53-55. Recent
research is redefining what intelligence is, and how it is measured. The limited
scope of the traditional IQ test, which only examines one type of intelligence,
is countered by new, more comprehensive tests.

Shafran, Avi, “Keep
intelligence in perspective; It's only one measure of worth,” Chicago Tribune,
April 21, 1993, p. 27. Avi Shafran comments on Daniel Seligman's book “A
Question of Intelligence,” which discusses the significance of intelligence
testing. The book is threatening to upset the apple-cart of politically correct
education theory, and while there might be some benefit, the very fact that the
volume is controversial has some troubling implications.

Norris, Bill, “Hurried
on to the exam treadmill at the age of 4,” Times Educational Supplement, Feb.
15, 1991, p. 15. Four-year-olds are competing for admission to private
nursery schools in New York City. An entrance exam, called the ERB after the
Educational Records Bureau, has sparked an intense debate about the validity of
intelligence tests for very young children.

Uses of IQ Testing

Barnett, W. Steven, “Benefits
of Compensatory Preschool Education,” Journal of Human Resources, spring 1992,
pp. 279-312. The long-term effects of compensatory preschool education
are examined to determine its ability to produce meaningful long-term
improvements in educational and economic success. Results indicate that
compensatory preschool education can produce long-term gains in school success
through contributions to cognitive abilities not adequately measured by IQ
tests, and this success is accompanied by improvements in economic outcomes.

Dumaine, Brian, “The
New Art of Hiring Smart,” Fortune, Aug. 17, 1987, pp. 78-81. To compete
in a global economy, American corporations are restructuring. As part of their
efforts to cut costs, companies are using sophisticated new techniques for
identifying talent, including job simulation exercises for blue-collar workers
and a renewed interest in IQ tests.

Humphreys, Lloyd G., “Commentary:
What both critics and users of ability tests need to know,” Psychological
Science, September 1992, pp. 271-274. Intelligence testing has been
heavily criticized in recent years on grounds of racial and ethnic
discrimination. The validity of intelligence tests is discussed on two levels:
generalized description of the items in intelligence tests and the correlates of
the total scores on those items.

Kelman, Mark, “Concepts
of Discrimination in General Ability Job Testing,” Harvard Law Review, April
1991, pp. 1158-1247. Federal civil rights laws prohibit employers from
screening potential employees by administering general intelligence tests if the
tests are not related to job performance and have a disparate impact on a
protected group. The argument that law takes too narrow a view of discrimination
to capture all of the harms caused by such tests is offered.

Williams, Dick, “Juries,
Not IQ Tests, Must Decide Capital Punishment,” Atlanta Journal Constitution,
Dec. 16, 1989, p. A17. Dick Williams comments on the Catch-22 situation
created by the Georgia Supreme Court ruling in which a convicted killer's score
on an intelligence test determines whether he will go to jail or to the electric
chair.

The kindergartener showed limited aptitude for numbers when she
used pencil and paper. But she dazzled her teachers with the “bus game.”
Pushing a toy bus, the little girl in Montgomery County, Md., kept an accurate
running count of imaginary riders as a teacher's story sent the bus whizzing
from one stop to another to pick up and drop off passengers.

The bus game is actually a carefully designed alternative to the
traditional method of identifying gifted students. Now being tested in several
school systems, it aims to unearth intellectual talent among children who
usually get poor test results, especially those from poor families or homes
where little or no English is spoken.

The experiment represents a practical application of Harvard
University psychologist Howard Gardner's theory that there are seven types of
intelligence. In addition to the linguistic and mathematical skills measured by
traditional IQ tests, Gardner lists five other intelligences: spatial, musical,
kinesthetic, interpersonal (the ability to know and understand others) and
intrapersonal (knowing and understanding oneself). The bus game was developed at
Gardner's Project Spectrum, which seeks to apply his ideas to early childhood
education.

At Montgomery Knolls elementary school, which has been testing
Gardner's concept for three years under a U.S. Department of Education grant,
many of the students are recent immigrants and receive free or reduced-cost
lunches.

“The basic idea here is to identify and nurture all of the
intelligences in populations traditionally at risk for school failure,” says
Jean Barton, project coordinator for Montgomery County's multiple intelligences
model program. “All of these children come with strengths. What they don't
come with is culture and language.”

It's not clear how many schools have latched onto Gardner's
multiple intelligences (MI) theory, launched in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind.
Gardner research assistant Mindy Kornhaber estimates the number at anywhere from
several dozen to a few hundred.

Although Project Spectrum advises selected schools and conducts
its own seminars, there is no “test kit” a school can send for. Neither has
Gardner developed the standardized examination or numerical scores typical of
traditional aptitude tests.

“It's not easy and not prepackaged the way a lot of things
are,” notes Patricia O'Connell Ross, director of the Department of Education's
Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Education Program. The program is funding
Montgomery County and other school systems experimenting with Gardner's
approach.

Ross was drawn to Gardner's theory because it may answer a
fundamental criticism of gifted programs -- that they are primarily elite oases
for the white middle class. According to a 1988 Department of Education survey
of eighth-graders, almost half of all gifted and talented students come from the
nation's top socioeconomic quarter.#

At the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., school system, Gardner-type
assessments are uncovering far more minority children than traditional tests,
according to Anne Udall, coordinator of gifted and talented programs. After
using the new approach for the first time this year, 17 percent of
second-graders identified as gifted were minority, compared with 10 percent in
past years.

By observing how children assemble pumps, build toothpick
bridges or design imaginary schools, educators in Charlotte-Mecklenburg are
responding to Gardner's charge that traditional intelligence tests “rarely
assess skill in assimilating new information or in solving new problems.” In
Gardner's words, information-oriented aptitude tests are biased toward “crystallized”
rather than “fluid” knowledge.## And some children may not be good at both.

After Charlotte-Mecklenburg used Gardner's approach to pick
gifted students, “Teachers said some of [the] kids did really awful on the
standardized test,” reports Udall.

Skeptics in the field of gifted education also question whether
Gardner's theory, or something else, explains poor test performance among
disadvantaged and minority children. Education Professor James Gallagher of the
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill agrees that “we have a lot of hidden
talent.” But he suggests that the reason is deprivation at home, not neglect
of one of seven intelligences.

Like many firm believers in IQ tests, Gallagher doubts that many
children who score low in IQ will prove exceptional in the other areas. “If
Gardner does believe it happens, then all he has to do is trot out the kids and
say, ‘Here they are.'”

Yet so far, data is sparse in this relatively young experiment.
“This is difficult work still in its infancy,” Gardner concedes, “but it
is possible to assess intelligences in legitimate contexts. Our initial efforts
indicate that children ages 4-5 may indeed perform well on the non-traditional
intelligence tests even when they are not strong in language and logic.”

Gardner also disputes the view of IQ traditionalists that it
takes a genius-level IQ to become a great artist, dancer or musician. “My own
view is that high performance in specific domains requires a normal IQ but no
more,” he says.

Even admirers of Gardner's work acknowledge that his concept of
intelligence seems “murky” to many educators, in the words of the Jacob
Javits program's Ross. “It's theory,” she says. “It isn't proved. You
either believe it or you don't.”

FairTest, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Mass., says IQ
testsdiscriminate against test-takers who don't fit a white, middle-class
profile, such as students brought up in homes where English isn't spoken.
FairTest considers the following questions from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale
for Children-Revised (WISC-R) as examples of cultural bias often found in IQ
tests. The WISC-R test is administered orally in a one-on-one situation, usually
to diagnose learning problems. A newer version of the test, known as the WISC-III,
is available, but WISC-R is still used by some schools. The San Antonio- based
Psychological Corp., which publishes the WISC-R test and conducts its own
bias-review experiments, contends that none of the questions below is biased.

Question 1

Q: “How tall is the average American man?”

A: “Any answer from 5'7” to 5'11“ is correct”.

FairTest's analysis: Children often answer with the height of
their own fathers. Asians and Latin Americans are often shorter than typical
American males.

Question 2

Q: “What is the thing to do when you cut your finger?”

A: 2-point response: “Put a Band Aid on it.”

1-point response: “Go to the doctor (hospital)....Get it
stitched up.”

0-point response: “Suck blood.... Don't panic.”

FairTest's analysis: Minority children usually perform poorly on
this item. A Baltimore, Md., sociologist found that many inner-city youths
answered “Go to the hospital” because they thought that “cut” meant a
big cut. When the children were told that “cut” meant a little cut, almost
all then responded “Put a Band Aid on it.”

Question 3

Q: “What are you supposed to do if you find someone's wallet
or pocketbook in a store?”

A: 2-point response: “Find out whose it is and return
it....Give it to the store owner (store guard, policeman).”

1-point response: “Try to find the owner.”

O-point response: “Make believe you didn't see it.....”

FairTest's analysis: According to psychologist Robert Williams,
who is black, “Given the context today of the negative emphasis on black
crime, black children pulling wallets or snatching purses, it would be suicide
for a child to say, ‘I would pick it up and try to find the owner.'... They
would be accused of having snatched it.”

Eerie stories abound. In 1979, Oskar, who was raised by a Nazi
family in Czechoslovakia, was reunited with his identical twin, Jack, raised as
a Jew in Trinidad. Both habitually flushed the toilet before and after using it,
and both enjoyed deliberately sneezing to startle people in elevators.#

The two men participated in a study of more than 100 sets of
identical twins and triplets. Since identical twins have the same genes, the
study assumed that similarities between twins separated at an early age were due
to genetics and that differences resulted from their dissimilar environments.
The study team, led by University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas J. Bouchard,
found a high correlation between the IQs of identical twins reared apart and
concluded that the contribution of genes to IQ is 70 percent.##

But such findings can have disturbing implications. The prime
minister of Singapore, for example, has cited the Minnesota research in
defending eugenic policies that encouraged middle-class citizens to bear
children and discouraged child-bearing by the poor. And liberals traditionally
bristle at the suggestion that intelligence is inherited just like blue eyes --
and is just as impervious to change.*

In fact, critics of the Bouchard study point out, correlation
does not equal causation; just because two things happen together a lot doesn't
mean one causes the other. Take the example of hair length and gender posed by
sociologist Christopher S. Jencks. We know that short hair is highly correlated
with American males. Social scientists could say, therefore, that hair length is
caused by having a Y chromosome (the chromosome that determines maleness). But a
change in fashion tomorrow (in other words, an environmental effect) could wipe
out the apparent biological connection.

Critics further caution that there is a high possibility of “coincidental
similarity” in the case of two people born in the same country at the same
time and raised in similar middle-class homes in Western societies. Several of
the identical-twin pairs studied by Bouchard, including Oskar and Jack, had met
before participating in the study, a typical weakness in twin studies.

“Since there is no practical method for separating the
physical and social effects of genes,” Jencks maintains, estimates of the
amount of influence genes have on intelligence and other traits must include
both factors. Even Bouchard has acknowledged that the identical genetic makeup
of the twins he studied “makes it probable that their effective environments
are similar.” A fretful infant, for example, elicits a different response from
a parent than one with a sunny disposition, Bouchard notes.

The extent to which adult expectations can affect a child's
intellectual performance was illustrated in the famous Pygmalion experiment in
1968. At the beginning of the school year, researchers (who have been faulted on
methodological and philosophical grounds) gave elementary school teachers a list
of children who supposedly had high aptitude-test scores. In fact, the children
were picked at random. When the school year ended, the experimental children
showed significantly greater IQ-test gains than their classmates, presumably in
response to their teachers' high expectations.* * #

Currently, some researchers are trying to link IQ to specific
sets of genes, much as medical researchers have identified the gene for some
hereditary illnesses. Robert Plomin, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State
University, is expected later this year to report on his research into gene
similarities among high-IQ children.

While Plomin's approach may be ideal for pinpointing diseases
caused by a single gene, such as Huntington's disease, scientists think it
unlikely there is a single gene for intelligence. Rather, IQ is believed to be
influenced by tens or even hundreds of genes. It may well be that each of the
genes involved subtly influences a person's IQ, together with environmental
factors.

Student portfolios chart the development of visual skills
inPittsburgh's Arts PROPEL program. Eighth-grader Dennis Biggs did each portrait
of a classmate in three minutes. The first is a contour drawing; the second uses
all circular lines; the third uses lines drawn with a ruler. GRAPHICS: Drawings.

Source: “Testing in American Schools: Asking the Right
Questions,” Office of Technology Assessment, 1992

In 1991, the latest year for which statistics are available,
36states evaluated students by examining their writings, portfolios of their
work, or hands-on demonstrations. Most states used the tests in coordination
with traditional multiple-choice tests. GRAPHICS: Map.

Source: “Testing in American Schools: Asking the Right
Questions,” Office of Technology Assessment, 1992

A logic problem from the 12th grade California Assessment
Program test assesses a student's ability to detect and explain faulty
reasoning. Students' answers to such open-ended tests help teachers to gauge
students' understanding of broad concepts.

Question: James knows that half of the students from his school
are accepted at the public university nearby. Also, half are accepted at the
local private college. James thinks that this adds up to 100 percent, so he will
surely be accepted at one or the other institution. Explain why James may be
wrong. If possible, diagram your explanation. GRAPHICS: Drawing.

Source: “Testing in American Schools: Asking the Right
Questions,” Office of Technology Assessment, 1992